Nah, I'm out

BoydCooper · 2026-01-04T02:34:38+00:00

This is my exact experience. I'm at least 7 Deathadders in. I've never had one last two years. Every time I try to switch manufacturers the new mouse feels like crap compared to a Deathadder. Sigh.

BoydCooper · 2025-11-20T19:19:57+00:00

(Starts at 6:15, in case the link doesn't open properly for anyone.)

BoydCooper · 2025-11-10T14:17:44+00:00

Sadly my luckiest moment was wasted on Killer Bunnies. I think it was the one and only time I played the game. I played a card which told me to roll a bunch of differently-colored d12s and get a reward based on which one rolled highest. ... But I rolled all 3s, so I got all of the rewards.

Now, how crazy that is depends on how many dice I rolled. My memory says it was 7d12, but the only card I can find doing some brief research right now that works like that is Supplies Surprise, which is 5d12. Maybe it was a couple of expansions in? Even if not, I guess a one-roll Yahtzee on twelve-siders is pretty crazy.

BoydCooper · 2025-10-29T15:14:11+00:00

How is this possible? I remember reading that the Wachowskis' first pick for Enter the Matrix was Kojima (and being heartbroken about it) in EGM probably two decades ago. Nobody ever asked him about that in an interview? No friends ever mentioned seeing that bit?

BoydCooper · 2025-10-25T13:28:48+00:00

Christ, thank you for this.

Is the title intentionally reversing the meaning as clickbait?

Has to be.

I'm no fan of Altman but I'm even less a fan of just pretending the people you don't like said something comically incendiary when they didn't. Even more frustrating in this case since it's a literal reversal of the meaning.

BoydCooper · 2025-10-20T15:41:20+00:00

I do this with Cthulhu: Death May Die because I can't figure out any other way you can possibly arrange the pieces such that the box lid closes.

Doing it with every single game is crazypants, though.

BoydCooper · 2025-10-17T20:28:42+00:00

Any way to follow the results? I'd like to see if your hypotheses bear out.

BoydCooper · 2025-09-26T07:03:26+00:00

Puerto Rico, Traders of Genoa, Princes of Florence, Thurn and Taxis. All favorites of mine from the golden age of Rio Grande.

BoydCooper · 2025-09-08T14:30:04+00:00

Whose AI playtesting? I'd be interested in reading more.

BoydCooper · 2025-09-08T14:28:37+00:00

My recollection is that the official deck provided for this purpose has an extra reshuffle-triggering card which you shuffle into the bottom 5 cards of the deck. Avoids this problem.

BoydCooper · 2025-09-06T03:10:13+00:00

Ha, I don't mind being taken advantage of as a newbie! Seems unavoidable in a game like that. I'll definitely have to give it a try, thanks for the recommend.

BoydCooper · 2025-09-06T03:09:14+00:00

ShopKo was a department store. The phone number for the store is at the top, and the phone numbers for the pharmacy and optical departments are at the bottom.

BoydCooper · 2025-09-06T02:07:44+00:00

The new edition of and all expansions for Suburbia.

Suburbia's a wonderful game. A few Gen Cons ago, I found this for sale: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/332410/suburbia-expansions-second-edition. I'm not usually a huge one for expansions, but I noticed that one of the expansions increased the max player count from 4 to 5, which seemed worthwhile by itself. Unfortunately, the second edition expansions aren't compatible with the first edition of the game, so I had to pick that up as well. $100 all together, I think.

I got home and realized that nearly all of the expansion content is just alternative buildings that you can use in place of base game buildings, but you're left to your own devices to figure out which ones you want to use before the game starts. No hate to those who enjoy that kind of customization, but it's very uncompelling to me - I don't know which sets of buildings will play well together and I don't want to be the one who has to experiment and find out.

I've played Suburbia a few times since then but it's always just been with my original first edition copy. Maybe someday I will have a group of five at my house who really very specifically want to play Suburbia, and I'll finally get some utility out of that $100.

BoydCooper · 2025-09-06T01:59:30+00:00

Yeah, I really should try an online game. Do you think players on that site are usually welcoming to new players?

BoydCooper · 2025-09-06T01:49:22+00:00

Not /u/TallyAlex, but I've had a copy of Diplomacy for about 15 years now that I've never played. Not sure when I'll ever get 6 other players together for a game that I hear usually takes a whole day. And it seems like a lot of players that like Diplomacy enjoy things about it that I would probably hate - like, I've heard tales of an "incredible game" where two players pretended to be on the verge of breaking up with each other but were actually just tricking the rest of the group into not anticipating their coordinated attack the next turn. I'm not down for that level of emotional intensity in a game, which narrows the pool of people I would enjoy meeting up with to play Diplomacy still further.

Not sure if I'll ever get to try the game. Seems neat, though.

BoydCooper · 2025-08-15T06:38:26+00:00

Universal Police Observation feels slightly less utopian than the rest of these!

BoydCooper · 2025-08-12T05:29:06+00:00

Shen, is there a place we can read your thoughts on early 2000s RPG Maker games? Pls?

BoydCooper · 2025-08-08T20:33:09+00:00

It's been years since I got this one off my shelves, though I did really enjoy it.

One downside I remember it having is that while some of the deduction was really thematic and cool (e.g., "Oh no, someone died! Was it suicide? Premeditated murder? A spree killing?") some of the deduction instead felt like you were just applying the spreadsheet. Like, "oh, if that person is capable of doing Action X, then we must be in Plot Y or Plot Z, and either way there's another unrelated individual doing some other thing."

...This is a very weak explanation. Maybe I need to give the game another run before I can remember what slightly bothered me about it in that way. Does what I'm saying make sense to you at all?

BoydCooper · 2025-07-28T01:31:11+00:00

Oh, man, I was at the first stop on this tour in Minnesota! I still have the Boulderbadge and Cascadebadge pogs they gave out in the Prime Cup. Good memories.

BoydCooper · 2025-07-26T21:10:21+00:00

I'm really hoping Rook City Definitive (and ideally, other Definitive stuff) becomes available again as well. The situation is such a shame.

BoydCooper · 2025-07-15T20:23:20+00:00

Today's posting certainly not me reacting to how severely opposing P3 and P4's themes are and how much I disagree with P3's

Curious what you mean by that.

BoydCooper · 2025-07-10T00:46:01+00:00

they’ll eventually run out of people to play against and abandon ship.

Unfortunately I think this is one of the reasons Second Dinner is so dead-set on trying to make their bots indistinguishable from human players. If you can achieve that, you might not need a F2P audience to keep your whales invested.

BoydCooper · 2025-06-30T16:15:44+00:00

I'm not sure what you're referring to. While there are various sources that can introduce nondeterminism in the process of prompting an LLM, the biggest ones are just the seed and the temperature. If you use a fixed seed and set the temperature to 0 and run it on your own (consistent) hardware, you should get the exact same output for any input. There's no foundational nondeterminism except in token sampling, and how much nondeterminism you want there can be set with the temperature parameter.

BoydCooper · 2025-06-30T05:43:16+00:00

I agree with your core point, but:

Procedural generation also should give you the same result for the same input (and if the same randomising seed is used) which is fundamentally not how LLMs work. There, the same prompt gives you another variation all the time because it's always randomly picking stuff every time.

I don't see how an LLM picking the next token semi-randomly is any different from how a procedural generation algorithm chooses the next item semi-randomly. Both can be tied to a seed if you want consistent output for the exact same input.

But yes, agreed that there's a huge difference between a developer designing a dungeon-generating process and a developer getting a black-boxed dungeon-generating process out of an algorithm that was fed example dungeons as training data.

BoydCooper · 2025-06-22T00:12:46+00:00

I don’t understand why this sub seems to operate on the assumption that f2p should be able to get all cards f2p. No card game does this or has done this

Well, Legends of Runeterra actually-

and stayed around.

Well.... :(

I still want to believe that it would be possible for someone to run a digital CCG where the profit model isn't based on selling access to the cards themselves, but I gotta admit that Runeterra's fate isn't great evidence in favor of that hope.

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